Learning Lisp/Scheme - Re: John McCarthy

You can come pretty close. A whole lot of the syntax is the same (parentheses-surrounded prefix function calls, for example), and much of the rest is trivial details of the "CL spells this foo, Scheme spells it bar" sort. It's only when you dig a lot deeper than most novices will that you start seeing major differences. I dunno. I learnt Lisp long before I learnt anything about the lambda calculus. Just as we teach kids to add and multiply before we teach them the underlying theory (this is why the New math was such a disaster - indeed, many people never learn the underlying theory because they have no reason to care about it), I see nothing wrong with teaching Lisp without teaching the underlying theory. It's true that you can't be really good at Lisp without at least a little of the underlying theory, but you don't need it in the form of theory; what you need are the abstractions, without necessarily understanding their theoretical underpinnings. It's perhaps better if you do, but that's true of any field; just as I'm a better Lisper for knowing a little about the lambda calculus, I'm a better C programmer for knowing a little about complex analysis and Taylor series and error analysis and combinatorics and many other things. Indeed, I would argue that some familiarity with the lambda calculus will make you a better programmer even if you never touch Lisp. Much the same is true of combinatorics and all those other fields. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B